Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513. “Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.” The great philosopher David Hume recognized that the opinions that support government receive their force from “other principles,” among which he includes fear, but these other principles are “the secondary, not the original principles of government.”

Tolstoy indicates it. ‘Do not resist evil, but also do not yourselves participate in evil–in the violent deeds of the administration of the law courts, the collection of taxes and, what is more important, of the soldiers, and no one in the world will enslave you’, passionately declares the sage of Yasnaya Polyana. Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. Leo Tolstoy. Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced if it is the voice of Truth. MK Gandhi.